Cubansaltyballs:In my experience, a lot of Baby Boomers have jobs they should not have and only have them because some other Boomer promoted them. When they see a Gen Xer, they become afraid that some 35 year-old will show the world how incompetent they are.

It's protectionism. The faster this generation dies, the better off we'll all be.

Whatever you have to tell yourself to avoid facing the truth about your performance.

Funny how many of us Gen Xers are doing fine, but YOUR failures are due to a mass conspiracy by "the man" that keeps you down.

snowshovel:Anyway....I'd probably give the millenials the internet (which I can argue that Generation X may get)...but the millenials more importantly get: always on social connections.

Late Boomers built personal computers and the web software itself, Gen-X built the post-web Internet and blogging, but the Millenials have built the latest round of social media and a lot of apps.

What's the deal with the Gen-Y/Millenial constant social media thing, anyway? Before the web, Gen-Xers (like me) were the kind of people to keep a Post Office box instead of getting mail at home. (It helps keep Sallie Mae off our backs.) The last thing we'd do is put our entire lives online.

snowshovel:Throughout much of the early video era (late 70's - all of the 80's), video games were an almost exclusive boys club, and a somewhat derogatory club at that. Being labelled a "video game geek" was NOT cool. And this doesn't take into account that video games were pretty much ignored by females or frowned upon by girls/women until fairly recently.

What are you talking about? The video arcade was the coolest place to be in the 80s and lots of girls were there. Moreover, it was something that existed just for Xers because it died out in the 90s when everyone got home consoles. For a brief period, it was THE hangout if you were underage.

It's kind of crazy how many of my friends have started their own businesses, but it's equally crazy how many of those businesses revolve around providing services to people who have jobs that take up all their time.

Silverstaff:Boomers, in the 60's they were saying to never trust anybody over 30, who went to Woodstock, who got high as a kite on MJ, who were the hippies and flower children who weren't trusted by the "Greatest Generation" who thought that everything was falling apart because the kids these days didn't want to work and just wanted to listen to Rock & Roll music and party and avoid responsibility. . .are now acting just like their parents did way-back-when and acting like they were always super-hard working industrious people who never took the time to enjoy their youth and see the young of today as shiftless and lazy.

The dead truth is that every generation is exactly the same, with two principle modifiers:

1) Each generation acts in accordance with its age bracket (with young people seeking freedom and recreation and older people seeking security, family, and political jurisprudence)

2) Each generation acts in accordance with the size of its population. As I said earlier, larger population groups tend to be dumber, greedier, and more full of themselves because they prop themselves up through self-reinforced rhetoric.

The thing is, I have little in common with Gen X. I never knew who Kurt Cobain was at the time, and for quite a while when other kids were talking about Nirvana in school I thought Buddhism was a fad. I never listened to grunge music, and I was sheltered enough from a lot of pop culture as a kid I didn't have many of the same cultural touchstones of Gen X (aside from watching the fall of communism, the destruction of Challenger, the Gulf War, ect).

Depending on the definition of X, you are an X'er. The term was coined originally to cover the last 4 year of the baby boom generation (1960-64) but has now been applied from 60-80 or 65-80. If you were sheltered though, it is pretty obvious that you wouldn't have much in common with the typical X'er. More of a millennial thing.

Silverstaff:Ishkur: Silverstaff: I was born in 1978. A few sources would call me a millennial, but most try to call me Generation X. The cutoff date is always put somewhere in the late '70's, usually towards 1980.

Gen-X is typically considered to be born from 64-79 with a peak year of 1971.

Demographics/sociology is about approximations and generalities, not specifics. You as an individual can choose to be anything you like -- either both or nothing. A single statistic is not relevant when plotting overall population trends. There are always going to be outliers, but their presence or existence is rarely pertinent. It's just wayward data.

With that said, the years 78-82 are weird years in that they are the lowest birth rates in the 20th century. There are hardly anybody from those age groups that are around, and whether they fit with the Xers or the Millenials tends to factor in with the age of their families ie: whether they are the youngest (will lean Xer) or the oldest (will lean Millenial) -- or have any siblings at all -- is a huge factor in developing a generation's outlook.

Yeah, my parents were both born in the early '50's, and are quintessential boomers. Right down to my grandfather being a WWII veteran who came home from the war to start a family and my father having this bizarre kismet of getting a high five-figure job despite having no college education, and my mother sincerely telling me when I went off to college in '96 that right after graduation I could get an "office job" by just having "any college degree" and walking into the office of "any firm downtown" and telling me student loan debt didn't matter because I would be able to pay it all off in just a few years after graduation because I'll be a college graduate.

Then again, my mother was HEAVILY pressuring me to go to law school, she believed that having a J.D. and passing the bar basically instantly meant you were going to be wealthy and affluent since lawyers make so much money. I almost went down ...

SpectroBoy:Cubansaltyballs: In my experience, a lot of Baby Boomers have jobs they should not have and only have them because some other Boomer promoted them. When they see a Gen Xer, they become afraid that some 35 year-old will show the world how incompetent they are.

It's protectionism. The faster this generation dies, the better off we'll all be.

Whatever you have to tell yourself to avoid facing the truth about your performance.

Funny how many of us Gen Xers are doing fine, but YOUR failures are due to a mass conspiracy by "the man" that keeps you down.

Now imagine an entire generation of kids like that. Voila. The Millennials.

"Virtually every one of my friends is doing something entrepreneurial," either starting a business or going to work for a start-up, she said. "Xers are drawn to flatter, less-hierarchical firms. They want to take their destinies into their own hands."

I usually loathe articles discussing the traits of entire generations and while I wouldn't necessarily call going to work for a start-up as 'entrepreneurial', I used to work for Prudential Insurance until I was about 29 and left to work for a very small company. And while I left Pru because I hated it there, one of the big appeals of the new company was its size. Of course over the years, that company has been acquired twice and I'm back to working for a huge company again, but those 4-5 years when that small company was still independent, my salary level went up faster than I had ever hoped for. I'm no senior VP or anything, but that really jump started my income compared to what was going on at Pru.

SockMonkeyHolocaust:It's kind of crazy how many of my friends have started their own businesses, but it's equally crazy how many of those businesses revolve around providing services to people who have jobs that take up all their time.

If I make X for one hour of work and someone who does a chore for me charges X/2 for an hour, should I hire them to do it?

If you like doing the chore, do the chore. If you don't and have a more gainful use for your time, do that instead. It's not about discipline, it's about a specialization economy.

Omahawg:every time they want me to do more work I just say "that's cool. now how about some more pay?"

then they don't give me any more work.

so I can sit on fark dispensing wisdom while posting wesley willis songs on facebook

I see the problem.

When I was coming up the way to get ahead was to take on more work and responsibility (particularly for women and minorities). After you proved that you could do it you might get a raise and/or promotion. The work place has never been a perfect meritocracy, but if you are not willing to take on more challenges don't expect a promotion. (I.e. don't expect the promotion first.)

Graffito:Omahawg: every time they want me to do more work I just say "that's cool. now how about some more pay?"

then they don't give me any more work.

so I can sit on fark dispensing wisdom while posting wesley willis songs on facebook

I see the problem.

When I was coming up the way to get ahead was to take on more work and responsibility (particularly for women and minorities). After you proved that you could do it you might get a raise and/or promotion. The work place has never been a perfect meritocracy, but if you are not willing to take on more challenges don't expect a promotion. (I.e. don't expect the promotion first.)

You valued yourself so little that you were willing to work for free? Hope your glorious bosses never took advantage of that.

mbillips:Generational groupings are the stupidest possible way to categorize people. I was born in '62; what do I have in common with someone born in '45 (other than remembering cars without seatbelts)? Gen X is supposedly '65 to '79? So if you were 21 in 2000, you were a peer of someone who was 35? No.

According to a lot of people in this thread their problems won't be solved unless you kill yourself.

Graffito:Omahawg: every time they want me to do more work I just say "that's cool. now how about some more pay?"

then they don't give me any more work.

so I can sit on fark dispensing wisdom while posting wesley willis songs on facebook

I see the problem.

When I was coming up the way to get ahead was to take on more work and responsibility (particularly for women and minorities). After you proved that you could do it you might get a raise and/or promotion. The work place has never been a perfect meritocracy, but if you are not willing to take on more challenges don't expect a promotion. (I.e. don't expect the promotion first.)

That's like getting promoted to a coaching position by being a better player. If you want to be the coach, show them what gains can be made from changes in coaching. Work ethic only gets you to do the same thing more, vision and problem solving keep a business competitive.

Farkbert:I don't know....I managed to do fairly well, but doing so meant:

1.) Busting my ass non stop. (hint: if you've never worked 60-80 hour weeks for a couple years straight you haven't busted ass yet)2.) Taking every opportunity to get ahead, including many job changes and joining 4 different early stage startups.3.) Changing industries several times in order to be where the best opportunities are.4.) Proving my worth again and again, but also always demanding compensation that is in line with my contributions. I walked out of a job once because management lied about potential future stock options that never had any chance of happening.

/ in the end, they brought me back in with an agreement to pay me commissions on products sold, which was a very nice deal// I quit 6 months later to go to a new startup, which in the end was a much better deal

Tyrone Slothrop:Thanks to the death of the pension boomers can't afford to retire, which makes getting jobs by younger generations even harder. But hey, not having to pay pensions means higher stock dividends, right?

The money that corporations save by not providing pensions or health care can be used to pay employees more! Free market, yeah!

so I can sit on fark dispensing wisdom while posting wesley willis songs on facebook

I see the problem.

When I was coming up the way to get ahead was to take on more work and responsibility (particularly for women and minorities). After you proved that you could do it you might get a raise and/or promotion. The work place has never been a perfect meritocracy, but if you are not willing to take on more challenges don't expect a promotion. (I.e. don't expect the promotion first.)

You valued yourself so little that you were willing to work for free? Hope your glorious bosses never took advantage of that.

Of course some did. That's the way it works, but I got valuable experience to put on my resume, and I got a new job. I've always volunteered for assignments that were a little beyond my experience level. The employer took a chance that I might fail, and in exchange I got the chance to acquire new skills.

I guess I lucked out. 36 years old, executive position in my organization. Of the 22 other people who have my job across the state, I'm the youngest, but 6 are retiring in the next five years. Three retired this past year and 40-50yr olds filled all the vacancies. Of course, I work in government, so more people are are able to retire than in the private sector.

ordinarysteve:largedon: The Southern Dandy: They always told us growing up, that watching TV would turn our brains to mush. Gen-Xers are the proof. Those brain-washed, cable news watching idiots have farked up this country to the point where I'm not sure it can ever recover. No, scratch that. I sure it won't ever recover.

Ishkur:mbillips: Generational groupings are the stupidest possible way to categorize people. I was born in '62; what do I have in common with someone born in '45 (other than remembering cars without seatbelts)? Gen X is supposedly '65 to '79? So if you were 21 in 2000, you were a peer of someone who was 35? No.

It has to do with post-war families. Boomer families had more children for longer, typically between 3-5 boomer kids over a period of 15 years, starting in 1946. Xer families had 1-3 kids, almost all in the 70s, and Millenial families had mostly 1 child in the late 80s. Almost never more than 2. This is due to the fact that child-rearing is becoming prohibitively expensive for modern societies.

I've seen that up close. I was born in '64. I have absolutely nothing in common with the generation that was born just ten years earlier, or ten years after. The older ones had, for the most part, better schools, cheaper access to higher education, and real apprenticeships still existed. The younger was gifted with a severely aged teacher workforce and school systems that had been butchered to the marrow to support Reagan's "throw bucketfulls of money" policies toward the Military and his owners in the supporting industries.

One of my best buds in high school was born in 65, his pop was wounded somewhere in France about a month after crossing the beach at Normandy. His oldest brother was killed in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. His youngest brother was born after that. Their mother was a nurse in some Army hospital in England and thats how their parents met. Their parents had 6 kids over the span of 24 years. Guessing, their mom was in her mid-40s when she had her last baby. Their sister was the original "knocked-up in high school" chick when the party scene took over world in the late 1970s.

My generation, born in the area around '62-'67 just didn't have a lot of kids. An awful lot of the people I knew who graduated high school in the early 1980s didn't have more than one or two, if any at all. Well, with the exception of Bob, he had something like 8 kids, but he started early and just a few months ago became a great-grampa, and he's still married to the woman he knocked up in our senior year. He's happier than a duck in a summer rainstorm. His family has been very productive.

I'm a really late Boomer - I missed out on the Summer of Love but have to endure all the crap from my older brothers and sisters, like how they all went from being Yippies to being Yuppies. What I dislike about my own generation is the astounding hypocrisy. The guy who went to law school to represent injured workers? Yeah, he's now working for the insurance companies helping them screw injured workers out of their payouts. The friend who went to medical school and promised to devote 50% of his time to inner-city clinics? Now working for Kaiser and living in a gated community.

Not all of my friends sold out, but I've noticed one thing: the ones who got a little money, suddenly wanted ALL the money. There seems to be no middle ground among my circle of friends. You're either still working at a job you feel contributes to the overall "good" of society (teacher, nurse, etc) and watching your buying power erode and your career stall, or you're feeding at the trough and joining the country club.

I can understand the Gen X folks and the Millennial kids. They were smart enough to realize that the era of companies actually taking care of their workers is long gone. They see no reason to be "loyal" to a company whose upper management will sell them down the river faster than a New York minute.

Kriggerel:Oh boy! This is the thread where every Gen Xer who dares to complain about getting handed a ration of shiat will be upbraided one one side as not bootstrappy enough by the FYIGM boomers still fellating Reagan's corpse, while hearing the dulcet cries of I EXPECT RESPECT!!! from the millennials on the others.Fun times, fun times!

No. This is the thread where a bunch of people complain that their shiat sandwich is somehow worse than everybody else's shiat sandwich.

FLMountainMan:I guess I lucked out. 36 years old, executive position in my organization. Of the 22 other people who have my job across the state, I'm the youngest, but 6 are retiring in the next five years. Three retired this past year and 40-50yr olds filled all the vacancies. Of course, I work in government, so more people are are able to retire than in the private sector.

GardenWeasel:I've seen this movie. Your Father was aloof and your Mother pushy because you are really a bastard child and she needs you to be upwardly mobile to atone for her sins. Does she have more pills and alcohol than the corner CVS?

I don't know what movie you're talking about, but yeah, my father was very aloof. He worked incredibly hard and was gone most of the time. He did make an effort when I was in High School to move to a less time-intensive position at work so he could spend more time with be before he went off to college, but I was in my teens before I saw my dad more than a few hours a week.

It's not like we've ever done DNA tests, but I'm the spitting image of what my dad looked like at my age. Seriously, looking at old photos of him, the family resemblance is amazing.

My mother, yeah she drank constantly. She liked to hide it. The only time as a kid I noticed anything was funny was when I accidentally reached for her glass of coke one day instead of mine on the living room table. She had a very strong amaretto and coke. She was very heavily addicted to xanax for many years, even attempted suicide using them in a massive overdose about 5 years ago. She says she's clean and off the alcohol and pills now, but I have no way to verify that.

She had a job. She used to be a buyer for a department store chain. When she got pregnant with me, she had some complications, so she went on maternity leave a little early. Once I was born, she devoted herself to being a full-time mother, and I was the 100% focus of her life from the day I was born, until around my junior year of college.

What changed? Well, I went off to college, but that didn't stop her smothering. I had a phone with an answering machine in my dorm room (remember, mid-to-late 90's, no cell phone), and she'd leave me a half-dozen messages during the day while I was in class. She'd call me in the morning to wake me up, and want to talk for a half-hour or more every night before I went to sleep.

My dorm roommate positively hated the fact that my mother would constantly call wanting to talk to me and I wasn't in. I didn't blame him. In later years, once I got a cellphone, she would call me pretty much every hour to just say hi, to tell me what's coming on TV, to just chat.

She insisted on me coming home every weekend, so she'd spoil me with lavish dinners and luxuries.

What changed was I finally, at long last, got a social life. I made actual friends (not just the kids of her friends who I was told to be friends with), I got a social life. I moved out of the dorms, and out of my parents house (which apparently did a serious number on her mental health, already fragile) and got a job to support myself. She freaked out at the idea that her son would be working at a convenience store. In her mind, I was a College Student, so I deserved a "good job" like working in an office or something, not doing lowly retail work. It wasn't pretty, and me seeking independence just accelerated her drinking and pill popping.

She has tried a few times to get a job. The problem is, that her entire skill set painfully obsolete. She has no idea how to use a computer. She was very proud for many years that she didn't know how to use a computer, and if she needed to look anything up online, she'd call me on the phone and have me do it. She used to practically brag she didn't know how to even turn the computer on. She can use a basic cellphone, and a fax machine, but anything more advanced and she's lost. She can't go back to being a department store buyer now. She had an architectural draftsman's license in the mid 70's, but she's 40 years out of practice. She refuses to do any manual labor. She basically has no job skills, refuses to believe she needs to get any job skills, and blames this problem on "kids and those microsoft things".

FLMountainMan:I guess I lucked out. 36 years old, executive position in my organization. Of the 22 other people who have my job across the state, I'm the youngest, but 6 are retiring in the next five years. Three retired this past year and 40-50yr olds filled all the vacancies. Of course, I work in government, so more people are are able to retire than in the private sector.

Our generation feels like were stuck behind the big bad monolithic Boomer generation and they wont retire before those sweet talking upstart Millennials position themselves to take our jobs so were going to job surf our way to advancement by proving that we don't need this job and we don't like this company and fark all of you, were taking our candy and were going home!

Here's the thing...If you prove you can't be relied upon, no one is going to rely on you.

I've worked for one company. I started at the bottom of it. I never asked for a raise. I never threatened to leave. Now I run the company and money...isn't a problem. Sooooooo.Maybe the whole, lets jump ship as soon as we hit rapids isn't the best move. K?

Very late Gen X'er. I've gotten ahead my whole life because I'm willing to put in the work(first official job when I was 16 and never stopped). I've worked for large business, small business, medium business, public corporations, privately owned businesses, etc. As the article mentions, large business is tough, but that's the case no matter what your age is. You're a number to a large business. Small and medium business is where its at. Battlefield promotions, more responsibility than you would ever want(which is great for your resume), outside the box thinking is valued, etc. I don't think that that has anything to do with being an X'er(though I can see how wanting to work for a small business could be seen as typical X'er counter-culture), but rather where business is today.

/I did work for one public megacorporation that truly took care of their employees(more perks than I've ever seen), but Fark has a real problem with their products: Anheuser-Busch

Sometimes I see people my age described as Gen X and sometimes as Millennials. I know that these things don't have hard-and-fast boundaries, but I never know which generation I supposedly belong to.

Are you hardworking and industrious or are you whiny and lazy?

Hardworking and whiny. Ha. It's fun being in-between the generations.

My parents are in-between Boomers and X, and it's always seemed like they defied any stereotypes. My dad was more of a boomer when he was younger because he looked up to that lifestyle, but as he's gotten older he definitely sounds more like a X'er especially when it comes to priorities. Too bad it's with his second family (see the first half of the last sentence).

Anyway, even the front half of the millennials are way more hardworking than the back half, but only time will tell if that's a generational thing or a maturity thing. It'll be interesting to see how the interactions between X and Y play out once the boomers do die off.

FLMountainMan:I guess I lucked out. 36 years old, executive position in my organization. Of the 22 other people who have my job across the state, I'm the youngest, but 6 are retiring in the next five years. Three retired this past year and 40-50yr olds filled all the vacancies. Of course, I work in government, so more people are are able to retire than in the private sector.

As a few have pointed out in this thread, when Boomers retire the job sometimes goes away through attrition/defunding, or the job gets handed *woosh* over our heads and down to someone who's 30 or younger.

A lot of Gen X'ers are or soon will be facing this fun fact: After years of biding our time, the Millenials won't want us around. Don't want that icky old age to rub off on them. Only problem is we still have a good 20 years left in our career life span. The boomers and their kids will fark us one last time.

On the other hand a disproportionate number of us went from things like starting zines and bands in the 80s to starting dot coms in the 1990s and 2000's.. and/or were ground floor or early adopter on a whole bunch of these fun technologies you now use daily without knowing much about them, like TCP/IP and BGP... Anyone who started a career as a techie in the 1990s has loads of options now, many of them quite good indeed.. So we know how to make things, build things,always have. We'll be fine.

Ageism is a thing though. I can't get past how it suddenly is to be considered OLD looking by people out in the neighborhood or on the job. Not age 30 old, but age 50 old. The one you can't recover from. The one that says gtfo pops you don't know anything. Using technologies and environments that my peers and I helped build.

Ishkur:Doc Daneeka: Definitions of Gen X that I see generally extend it to birth dates in the early 80s. Then again, the Millennial gen is generally defined as starting in the early 80s. As a 1981 baby, this is the source of my confusion.

I'm often considered too young to really be part of Gen X. But I don't identify with the Millennial generation either. I think of Millennials as people either in college now or recent grads. I've been out of college a decade now.

Do you have any siblings? ...how old are they?

That doesn't help much.

I have two older step-brothers from my (step-)father's first marriage who were born in the early-mid 70s and are clearly Gen-Xers. I'm from my mom's first marriage, but re-married soon after I was born and I have two younger half-siblings from their 2nd marriage who were born in '88 and '90 and are clearly in Millennials.

So my siblings fall cleanly into both generations. I'm in the middle but not particularly close in age to either set.

Boomers, in the 60's they were saying to never trust anybody over 30, who went to Woodstock, who got high as a kite on MJ, who were the hippies and flower children who weren't trusted by the "Greatest Generation" who thought that everything was falling apart because the kids these days didn't want to work and just wanted to listen to Rock & Roll music and party and avoid responsibility. . .are now acting just like their parents did way-back-when and acting like they were always super-hard working industrious people who never took the time to enjoy their youth and see the young of today as shiftless and lazy.

When I was in high school and college in the late 80s/mid-90s, all I ever heard from my elders was that GenX are a bunch of shiftless losers with no work ethic and questionable values. Well, now we're in our 30s or 40s and, frankly, I don't see any evidence that we're any lazier than any other generation. More snarky or sarcastic, maybe, but not lazy.

There was never anything wrong with being cynical about the age we grew up in. The Boomers had seemingly unbridled prosperity that started to lose steam right about the time many of the Xers were growing up and learning about how the world works. Especially late-Gen Xers. Being disillusioned or having to move back home after college (temporarily) wasn't something we wanted. It's just how it was for many of us. Just as it is now with GenY, Millennials, or whatever people are being called these days. But hell, these whippersnappers have it even worse than we did unless you're in one of the dwindling fields where demand outstrips supply.

THE GREAT NAME:Bollocks to the BBC and their "this content is not for domestic viewing" crap. Enjoy my license fee payments you assholes.

i stopped paying the fee many years ago. Now I watch programmes free an hour later than they show (BBC Iplayer), which suits me because I like to get up an hour later than most people and go to bed at least an hour later so the shows fit my bodyclock not the clock on the wall...

Most of the other channels fund themselves through adverts so I just download those shows as there is no fee to pay to watch.

Silverstaff:GardenWeasel: I've seen this movie. Your Father was aloof and your Mother pushy because you are really a bastard child and she needs you to be upwardly mobile to atone for her sins. Does she have more pills and alcohol than the corner CVS?

I don't know what movie you're talking about, but yeah, my father was very aloof...

Doc Daneeka:I have two older step-brothers from my (step-)father's first marriage who were born in the early-mid 70s and are clearly Gen-Xers. I'm from my mom's first marriage, but re-married soon after I was born and I have two younger half-siblings from their 2nd marriage who were born in '88 and '90 and are clearly in Millennials.

mother mary of god, you ARE one hell on an anomaly, aren't you?

Howabout this: Did you hang out at video arcades a lot when you were a kid?